I'd like to believe it is relatively powerful and relatively light weight, but different people may have a different opinions. If I knew what tasks you want to solve with an image editor, I would be able to tell you if it is suitable or if another editor would be a better choice.

Compared to Paint.net, it is much more powerful and you do not need .net framework installed and there is a portable edition available. That could count as a light-weight feature.

Nothing on DC as far as I know, but Paint.NET is a pretty full-featured image editor that's comparatively lightweight.

+1 for Paint.NET. It's quite good.

To be honest, I think it would be a complete waste of time for most people here to build an image editor, with perhaps the exception of mouser as it relates to existing software of his (Screenshot Captor). The market is flooded with editors. Unless someone comes up with a truly novel approach to editing - something that isn't out there now - I don't see any point in it. Special purposes are a different story though -- there's always room there.

^ I've never used your image editor... I knew about your icon editor and it's aces, so I'm glad this came up so I can take a look!

I've played with Vlastimil's RealWorld Paint quite a bit and it is indeed a very handy thing to have (portable version ). While I don't have Photoshop here at the office thanks to RWP, I don't miss it either.

I have checked out the editor mentioned by panzer (Chasys Draw IES) and it looks like a quite powerful tool and it does not use much system resources. It seems it used to be a commercial software in the past and now it is free. It may not be exactly easy to use, but that is more or less the rule with more powerful image editors.

Coincidentally, a new GIMP with single window interface was released today. From the screenshots, it looks like a definite improvement. Not sure if it can be considered light-weight though.